Humanism & Its Discontents (Session 6)

Hello and welcome to our sixth session of Humanism It's This Content with Professor Raza Negarstani. So please, Raza, take it on. Thank you everyone. I hope you're doing well, despite the terrible times. Let's have our presentation and then I will start. So, who is presenting? Oh dear, it's me. And I have to say I'm sort of half finished, but we'll kind of just go through, I decided to substitute any genuine understanding of the themes which I'm completely kind of yeah with um with ridicule and memes but uh well we'll try to be serious and we can kind of just

talk it through i think the most useful thing i can do uh what's the easiest way to send you all a pdf right now sure also um not to make more pressure but if you want to also open up some of the lines from that series of notes that you made. I mean, feel free. I mean, you can cover those too. Yeah, I'd be happy. I own the response anyway if he's here. So I'm happy to have him ask me or follow up on his questions. And with this presentation, we should feel free to just kind of interject and we can go through it. Let me open discord first because I think the best thing to do is to kind of just bring up the chart at the very end, so I have a separate PDF of that.

Let me see if I can just drag and drop it in the discord. I think you can you can also share it here in the chat from zoom. yeah let's see. Is there a. Google drive dropbox. here i just put it in in the discord can i let's see i don't see how to upload a file into the chat um can i just drag it yeah i think it works to just drag it it doesn't seem to like it there is also this small paper icon um there's this mayo and then a paper and then again uh-huh yeah google drive to log into google drive let's see why don't you

why don't you share the screen i mean if you don't have a compromise on your screen then share it no let's do it uh let's see share screen is here you got it Oh dear. Okay. I did make an account because this is a hypertext. And if I were really creative and fun, I would have just written all over this thing. But I didn't spend much time with it. It doesn't seem that useful. But this is one of the sort of lauded digital humanities. And as a great public intellectual of our time, Latour wants to be on the cutting edge and actually made a whole version of the book that you can put notes on and collaborate with him. That's been up since like

2014 or something. If you can just yeah, if you can a little bit zoom on it, yeah, that would be magnificent. Yeah, excellent. Well, okay, let's just do my presentation. So yeah, like I said, I I went with memes. Let's full screen it. Because this was a, I think, a good quote. Did that not work? No. So we told you the moderns warranted an in-depth anthropological study, but they too are really interesting, that they need us to approach their wounds with caution, but they are worth comforting. We might even contemplate caring for them."

And so Latour kind of addresses this whole work as a kind of imaginary anthropological investigation to this group, the moderns. It sort of reminds me of a lesson we had in, in, I guess, the sixth grade in like age 12 in America. We don't teach history. We have a discipline called social studies. And they had us do this lesson, a sort of basic anthropology, where you have to read an article about the Nasserima. I don't know, is anyone familiar with this? It is very much an American school thing. So if you can guess, the Nasserima are an exotic tribe north of the Mexican border. And the text spends a lot of time sort of describing their

exotic habits, especially in the field of corrective dentistry. And in cruel detail, lots of things about orthodontics and braces and sort of, I actually had one of these, it's called a palate expander. It's like a medieval torture device where you turn a key in your mouth and it makes your mouth bigger. But the Nasarima is American spelled backward and it's supposed to show American school children that you can view your own culture from the outside and that it can be sort of surprising and grotesque. And this seems to be sort of Latour's strategy for that he wants us moderns to view ourselves from the outside and learn to dispel are kind of dangerous illusions.

So we kind of start with this scenario where when we set out to view the modes of existence here. Well, let me full screen it. I don't know why. Can you see it properly? Or? Yeah, it's good. Yeah. He wants us to imagine that we sort of take on the role of this female anthropologist. The anthropologist goes to travel among the moderns. He also calls her the investigator. And so this anthropologist, she lives among the moderns and she observed them and learned about them. And she comes to see that they're sort of fundamentally deluded about how they view their society and who they are.

That they have these theories about how their society works. They conceive of themselves as sort of devoted to different distinct domains of life and culture, and that when you observe their practices, none of these things seem to hold. And the anthropologist is sort of faced with a unique dilemma that isn't available to the sort of classical anthropologist. of course, here's someone like Marie Strauss in the French mode who goes to live among the savages and then can return home and report back because this anthropologist has no home to return to. She is a non-modern modern who can see the illusions of the moderns, but in order to deliver her report, the institution, it also is modern. So she needs to find a way to explain to the moderns

how they are deluded in a way that he calls sort of diplomatic. She needs to sort of dispel the modern illusions. And so she switches her methodology from anthropology in the kind of imperialistic mode of the sort of colonial anthropologists who go out to something more like modern ethnography, where you form an account sort of in collaboration with your subjects, sort of working on their self-understanding. And the goal is to kind of to create a new self understanding that's amenable to the sort of objective description of modern practices without succumbing to the weaknesses of modern theories that don't hold. And it just so happens that this kind of imaginary lady anthropologist who are all asked to take the role of follows the perspective of Latour himself.

So here's a kind of brief outline of his career. actually comes from a French winemaking family in Burgundy, grew up a pretty strict Catholic, and trained both in philosophy and theology before then taking a job. I think France still had a had mandatory public service, either military or non-military, and so he chose to be a diplomat, went to Cote d'Ivoire in the sort of post-colonial African country in Abidjan and did anthropological fieldwork there as his kind of public service. And this is where he says he first came to sort of distrust the modern self-image.

He kind of makes this big splash into public life with Laboratory Life, the Social Construction of Scientific Facts, a book he published in 1979 and which kind of became part of the science wars. So he's an earlier developer of what's called the sociology of science or science and technology studies. But with the sort of feedback that he got, he continually likes to, especially in this book, he sort of does this whole dialogue of, oh, I'm so surprised why these scientists do not like my description of M, but using the word fabrication to describe objectivity rather than construction doesn't have the same connotation in English as it does in French. And I think there's a lot of

this sort of translation going on where French terms are sort of being used and thrown around in language that clearly make people anxious. But so Latour comes to sort of reject the whole concept of the social, the idea that he's a sociologist of science, he is something that he decides to retract, he goes back and strikes social from the title of the book, and instead simply calls it laboratory life, the construction of scientific facts. And he comes to believe that the concept social does no conceptual work, that it's a useless concept, and that he would be better thought of simply as doing science studies rather than sociology of science. And then he further develops this perspective in a theoretical framework he calls actor network

theory. And actor network theory, which he developed in relation with a bunch of other disciplines, puts forward this sort of flat ontology where every object in a network, whether it's the scientists, the microscope, the microbes, the sun on a certain day, sort of all of the conditions that go into sort of the production of empirical knowledge are considered equal actors and collaborators. So rather than having this sort of unique sense of human agency in the creation of science, science is simply a network that creates knowledge. And it's the flow through the network that becomes important for him.

So he continues to kind of develop this perspective in We Have Never Been Modern in 1991, where he kind of takes on the sort of fundamentally Cartesian view of science with a capital S, rejecting the culture-nature, subject-object divide, and he, from this point on, addresses his book to the non-modern moderns. His other sort of big public intervention, which is how I first became aware of him, is called Why Has Crutee Run Out of Steam. It's actually quite a sort of topically relevant. It diagnoses the problem very well of sort of scientific skepticism toward climate change. And it's where he sort of begins his kind of political engagement on questions of ecology as a sort of public intellectual.

and following that in reassembling the social is when he really starts to make his turn sort of back to his origins and philosophy advocating what he calls a practical metaphysics and this metaphysics is supposed to be empirical and realist about the world but not about one world but about the world and it accepts sort of at face value the ontological status of any kind of entity that can be invoked or encountered in action. And instead, we need to recognize the unique sense of agency and values that sort of inhabit and motivate these different worlds, these different modes of existence. So this sort of forms the structure of this work.

The anthropologist whose shoes were asked to take on starts by trying to do a sort of classical anthropology, she then realizes that she needs to do ethnography, she needs to take on the position of the moderns in order to explain to them better how they are deluded. From ethnography, when we've sort of managed to make for ourselves this conception of who we are that doesn't fall into this illusion, we move to ontology, where we recognize the different modes of being and recognize their reality. And then finally, we move to a kind of diplomatic ethic, which is where we recognize our non-modernity

and learn to negotiate with the fundamentally different ways of being and modes of existence and values that are held by different kinds of beings. And ultimately, the horizon of this is to come to terms with the truly other, other Gaia, his sort of figure of the earth that we have awoken in our folly by not respecting the ecological limits of the world. It's a term he adopts from James Lovelock as the sort of world that we can no longer ignore. So first, let's look a little bit at this ethnography. It's sort of pretty basic to us.

because it is just kind of this caricature of Cartesian dualism. And it is very French and it's sort of taking capital S science as this great value. It seems to me that as an American with things like the Scopes trial in our history and without a sort of pantheon of great scientists and artists, these things don't seem quite as transparently at face value. But let's sort of look at how the modern see themselves through the lens of something called society or civilization where they lift themselves up from nature and distinguish themselves from the non-modern humans and the non-human others. Knowledge is thought to be central to this self-conception

of the moderns and they divide all of their activities into domains such as science, law, politics, economy and religion. He doesn't include art in this, strangely enough, where it would seem obvious to me to do so. And that could be an interesting subject for discussion later. He brings in art under the topic of fiction and also in this concept of instauration. But here we have these different domains and we can think of them as pretty basically platonic, right? You have an ideal like truth or justice, order, efficiency, or sort of economic value, religion supplies us with meaning or faith. Art, you could say, is beauty or also meaning,

but that these domains are organized around sort of what the value is they claim to produce and pursue. And so the moderns then view the world fundamentally in this sort of dualism, this is a bifurcated world between subjects, beings that can act, and objects, beings that are acted upon, knowers and known. There are two kinds of information about the world, values that are held by subjects and facts that are about objects or subjects when they're considered as objects. And there are sort of two fundamental worlds in which things can be located, the world of culture or society and the world of nature. Another interesting one is that the moderns believe in belief. They believe the status of beliefs is distinct from the certainty proper to the motive truth or facts.

And finally, the moderns are us. So how do we talk about who or what we really are if we're not modern? And this is where actor network theory comes in. comes in. Actor network theory, rather than looking at domains of activity organized around a sort of ideal or a purposive sense of what it's trying to achieve, looks simply at institutions. And they see that these different institutions that inhabit the world don't adhere to any one domain of life, but extend across all of them. So just COVID-19 is a good example. Latour has also written about the pandemic. recently and has been talking about it publicly much, but you look at COVID-19 and it's an

entanglement of virology, epidemiology, politics, public health, economics, media studies, law, logistics, policing, ecology, religion, urbanism, architecture, protest, activism, all of these sort of different domains of activity are sort of connected in this event. And to understand it, we would have to understand all of these things and their interactions. So it's the sort of disciplines of knowledge that he thinks we are fundamentally deluded. This other matter is that viewing, sort of taking the value comes from a sort of belief in the values that it holds. People who live or interact with religious institutions

sort of accept religious certainty. and science should accept scientific certainty. And he sees the sort of actor network theory uses a concept of trust instead of one of belief, or sort of belief in the certainty or truth of a claim. We trust that the different modes of the network are operating correctly, are functioning how they're supposed to function. And so the actor network theorist sees a sort of double movement in this view from the outside, where you can see both the sort of functioning of the network from the inside, from the point of view of a user, and then from the outside as an engineer might view the network. I think this is a basically Heideggerian sort of idea between vorhandenheit and zuhandenheit, presence at hand and presence

to hand, or sort of a tool relation and a supposedly objective one. But the example he gives, also very French, is cooking your risotto at home. It's Italian, but you know the gas comes on when you turn on the oven. You don't think about how the political situation in Ukraine is affecting your gas. You don't think about where a leak might spring. That's the job of the engineer, but as the user, you see a sort of continuous world of function when you pull your phone out of your pocket and send a text message, you're not thinking about cell phone towers and network availability and the processing that goes into it. You are just involved.

So he thinks that part of our problem is that we're stuck some ways in the tool understanding. Here is where we get to the modes and their cross-ex. This is not something I think I understood in where we can discuss, because he believes that fundamentally the sort of diplomacy and what we need to do is about determining the crossings of these distinct modes of being. The network being the basic one, but we get things like reference, reproduction. I'll go on to the next one, but this is where I just simply could not figure out how to explain this concept and where I'll deal to you, but this is the PDF I sent. So this is the table at the

back where he goes through and sort of as he lists them in the book sort of breaks down all of the different modes of existence. And I think it might be the most useful thing we can do is just sort of stare at this and try to work it out because it's in these distinct modes and in their distinctive interaction and pairs where information goes through discontinuities and crosses over that he thinks real knowledge is made. Finally, a few more concepts that are very important. He has this sort of bizarre concept of the double click. Double click, as he keeps saying,

represents the sort of evil genius of the moderns. It's this ideal of unmediated knowledge whereby we're not sort of participating or changing the world, but simply no objects in a sort of abstract, immaterial way. He thinks that this specific mistake results from an elision or confusion between two distinct modes, the sort of connection of different references or signs and the reproduction of objects in space and time, the illusion that our references, the sort of symbolic or representational role that our words and signs play when they refer to objects in the world, thereby doesn't actually interact and change the way those objects reproduce themselves.

And he thinks this is the sort of great demon of modernity. And he calls it a category mistake or a second degree mistake that comes from failing to correctly distinguish between these modes of existence. One of the concepts that I found interesting that he proposes as an antidote to this is something called instaration, which seemed to me to model something like the self-assembly of biological systems, of sort of microbes. He's certainly done a lot of his work on biology, but he also uses this concept in relation to the work of art. The statue participates in its own creation and persistence, and it takes risks in continuing to be a statue that are independent from the agency of the artist.

In the same way that the yeast that brews the beer is alive and equally participating with the brewers of the beer. And then there's this sentence. I don't know, do you want me to read this sentence? I had difficulties with the style here, and I'm wondering whether it's an issue of translation or style. I'm a fan of run-on sentences often, some of my favorite literary, I love German. Run-on sentences can be great, but this just like pained me. Maybe I'll do it if you're all, after the terrifying scenes of empires in which all the other populations watched with alarm the downfall of the brilliant madmen who were overturning their own values along with those

of others in an indescribable disorder while chopping up the planet in a sort of juvenile theory, their eyes fixed on the past as if they were fleeing backward away from some dreadful monster before covering everything over with the cloak of inevitable modernization and the irreversible reign of reason. I would like to proceed as if the madman could calm down, go home, get a grip, chill out, and then come back to present themselves, not in order to apologize for who is weak enough to demand apologies, but to explain what they were looking for and to discover at last on their own what they were ultimately holding on to. Is Latour at fault here or is the translator somehow butchering what could be elegant in French?

Does anyone make sense of this? That's it. I'm open for questions, But I think the best use of our time would be to just stare at this big chart if we need to. Maybe I'll stop screen sharing now if you all have this or we can continue to look at it. But does anyone have questions for me on either this or we could go back to Nietzsche and Plato if we want. I did want to just kind of double check that last quote I thought was kind of the same as the idea of an embarrassment of riches of values that Latour says the moderns have, where they've kind of accidentally collected all these values from like ad hoc over time, and now are like, the cooling off, I don't see any evidence like

of that happening. But if in theory, the moderns were to cool off and like take stock of these values, that seemed to be what he's getting at. But I agree that this quote, this sentence is pretty out there. It feels like it's addressed to Donald Trump. Oh, no, this book's from before that he's done other weird things with trump who knows it's exact addressed to some exxon executive or but just as a there there are yeah there are issues with with style in here uh and perhaps of translation a lot of the concepts seem to be sort of directly sort of transliterated or just brought over from french you can do this in english uh we have a remarkable flexibility with

with French words because half our language was sort of colonized by French in the 12th century. But it doesn't make for good. Anyway, I found this sentence to be a real headache. I think this presentation deserves a C minus. Do you know why? Why? Because first in Choose Your Avatars, you did not include a bored ape. Number one. Two, you did not have enough French accent here. I had to resist. It seems like we don't have any Frenchies in our group.

I don't know what that says about us or about them. but it was magnificent excellent uh i have i have some questions and stuff but i would let everyone to interfere at this point and then yes you go to back to your notes um and kind of give us a little bit of a summary of what you were thinking with regard to nietzsche and fuko yeah let me just grab a glass of water and someone ask a question I had another question actually about the, from the introduction and the first chapter, I, and not knowing anything about Latour or actor network theory, I just can't tell whether

he's serious about something that came up in the introduction about like paying the ontological price for open-mindedness and the idea that there are different words, but we make the mistake of thinking that that's on top of a single reality. And he seems to be kind of pointing at like a pluralist ontology with these different modes of existence, but I just didn't see how that really was made real in any way. So I don't know if anybody can comment on that. That would be great. I have a hard time with it too. The explicit way that he's going about it is that he's taking sort of a model JL Austin and the conditions of verificate or felicity conditions.

He wants to say, first we can just start with language, right? And we can consider how, depending on the, in this sense, the sort of practical aims and goals. aims and goals. I guess I'm not familiar enough with Austen, but the idea is that different kinds of statements have different kinds of conditions based on their relation to other possible statements and role in a sort of greater semantic network of how we determine whether they're true or not, right? We don't hold all kinds of propositions to the same standards of whether they're true or false. We take into account their context in a sort of semantically holistic way. Maybe that's saying too much for Austin.

He sort of takes this old example from analytic philosophy of language and then says, we can just do this about the world and about how I perceived Jesus spoke to me from the spring and that anything that anyone considers to be influencing their actions is equal status. and that we also consider the sort of, he doesn't, yeah, the sort of the action, not the behavior of our laboratory instruments, our experimental subjects, as sort of equal participants in this and have coming from their own set of values and motivations, seems to be the angle he wants to take it.

I was not able to get a real handle on how he wants to make this transition from talking about language to simply taking at face value the reality of the entities proposed in language, especially when he's pretty serious about sort of dismissing, I guess what he calls correspondence, but we would just call representation, right? He certainly seems to be an anti-representationalist in that he doesn't think language is talking about, like, the aboutness of language to objects in the world. It seems like he would endorse something more pragmatist in the philosophy of language or functionalist. But I'm not able to sort of square that with how he tries to make that transition.

I mean, isn't it famous that one of the reasons for him to be a sort of philosopher, or not a philosopher, theorist, is that precisely because he thinks that the non-humans should be more than the locus of our symbolic representations, right? So he just like throw it out of the window right away. That is his main, actually he needs to have that sort of things. But he's not smart enough, that's the problem with Latour. That he actually is quite actually rightfully say that, look, majority of the sort of critical

sociology in the egalitarian, emancipatory sense are founded upon metaphysics. They actually say that they are not. He says that, no, this actually is a sort of false self-consciousness about the metaphysics. It's quite a very traditional Hegelian move. who Miguel warns people who say that we can get rid of metaphysics or do away with metaphysics. So what he actually does, and that's why I'm saying that he's not smart enough, create a sort of metaphysics that is actually his methodology. So your methodology should be answering and explaining your metaphysics rather than being the metaphysics itself, right?

Yeah, that makes sense to me. Because yeah, it seems like when he's sort of attacking this sort of, what seems to me a sort of straw man of capital S science, and attacking these sort of Cartesian and sort of positivistic attitudes that, I guess, my understanding of philosophy being more narrow and focused on the kind of Hegelian and American pragmatist tradition are things that sort of that had been done away with and dealt with, yes, from Hegel onward, but certainly from the 50s and 60s. Think about this. Look, when he is talking about this sort of metaphysics and things, I mean, rationalist metaphysics like Christian Wolff have been working on that,

right? Leibniz has been working on that. And Kant, essentially Kant's revenge on his early influence, his metaphysical influence, is precisely this, that he actually tries to distinguish the methodology, rational methodology, from the metaphysics itself. The metaphysical questions are always there in the background. He tries to actually turn the plurality of methods into plurality of metaphysics. In that sort of move, he does two fundamental mistakes. One, he abolishes the distinction that ought to be preserved between

methodology and metaphysics. And two, by virtue of confusing or aligning the distinction between the plurality of methods and plurality of metaphysics, it comes up with a metaphysical bloatware. Like when you get a computer full of goddamn shit, that's exactly what Latour philosophy is. It doesn't even bloat. It reminds me of Mainong, right? Sorry? It reminds me of Mainong. Yes, Mainan, Mainan Jungle, absolutely, yes. I'll just say one more thing and then we'll go to the questions because I saw, Cassia has one, but also Felipe, I saw a couple hands raised before. But the one thing I'll say is that there was one chapter that I sort of liked, where he described climbing a mountain and the sort of way that you use maps, right?

And this is a very good kind of critique of sort of a naive representationalism or empiricism. The map and the territory don't resemble each other. It's their sort of functional relation as sets of signs to features of the world that allow the user to use the map. And this seems to me like points that Kant and Hegel made, that these are philosophical issues that were dealt with in the tradition. Even Leibniz sort of formulated his metaphysics on the basis of a map, right? The whole modern innovation of Descartes was to disconnect representation from resemblance.

And so he sort of does this thing where he thinks he's critiquing Cartesianism and sort of reiterating Descartes basic innovation and philosophy. And then Kant sort of definitively removes this from experience. And it's solely the sort of logical relations and rules of the map that allow us to navigate the territory and not some supposed resemblance or sort of between things and words. Yes. Another issue that came up, I mean, I suppose many of you have read that skating essay by the Butcher of Beirut, Ray's, Ray Brzee, object and concept. I mean, it gets a little bit too much

calling him a Roman Catholic. You know, you don't expect anything more from a Roman Catholic. He says that a little bit too much, to be honest with you. But the thing is that Ray actually doesn't pay attention that Latour actually does not say ever that A&T, actor network theory, is an assemblage of objects. He says that it's a concept. It's a multitude of tools, right? So he is, again, within the tradition of working,

within the tradition of certain sort of philosophy. But the position is extremely confused because he then goes then uh basically criticizes uh you know uh philosophy uh modern philosophy a critical sociology by virtue of not having by virtue of not being rooted in empirical facts about things like how the fuck empirical things are being gathered yeah without without the system of theory making oh yeah no i'm i was perplexed but uh let's uh cassia do you want to uh yeah just a quick question i guess uh you mentioned uh right in the beginning of

for presentation that the distinction between facts and value concerns information about the world. And Latour writes at some point that the distinction between trust and certainty, if I'm not mistaken, is, let me, in effect between an appeal to certainty and an appeal to trust, two things that involve, as we shall discover, entirely different philosophies or rather metaphysics or better still ontologies. It is kind of strange to me because what he's conceiving of ontology here,

because if we perceive the distinction between fact and value, which seems to be pertinent to interpret that distinction between trust and certainty is conceived in terms of information, I was inclined to interpret the use of ontology in the terrain of information science as regions or or domains of discourse. But since ontology here is related to metaphysics, is kind of strange for me to perceive the whole implications of the distinction between fact and value, which seems to support all of Latour's critique in this book.

And I was thinking about this point, So just it, I guess. Yeah, I'm not sure I have a, because I also couldn't. Yeah, I mean, so I guess the way it seems to work is that sort of facts, the idea that facts are things that we sort of absolutely know and can grasp on. it sort of fits into this what this mistake of the double click right where facts are just these available things about the world that you have access to without any kind of sort of material action and interaction with the world that that trying to determine a fact necessarily is an

interaction with other non-human agents, other human agents, and with the objects that you are trying to say a fact about. And so it necessarily changes them and is sort of value-laden. And the point about trust and certainty is that we need to sort of trust that our networks are functioning as they're supposed to function. And so trust is something you build out of practice, out of seeing that practices work, whereas certainty is something, is a belief, is you simply sort of, you're accustomed to taking these claims at face value rather than, rather than being in the process of veridifying them. This point seems fine to me. I guess another, I listened to another

talk where Latour went off about how much he hates the kind of like the little videos that you might see when you go to like a scientific talk for non-experts or like if you go to a planetarium and they show you like the big bang on a screen and it's like an artist's rendering of these like yeah like molecules and the origin of the universe and galaxies he sort of rants against this thinks it's like confusing art and the sort of actual he thinks we shouldn't mistake a kind of false representation of a scientific certainty or of a this is the way it is from like in any way

with the actual act of figuring out what it is, right? That it's only in doing research, only in living laboratory life that you can determine the way things are. And that to then just say, that's a fact and we have it now and it's written in the book of facts seems to be his critique. He thinks sort of everyone should be engaged in this active process of verifying the truth and participating in it. Have you all noticed that, I mean, those of you who have read Cassia mostly, I mean, but Aaron and other good friends, have you noticed that there is a certain kind of phantom resemblance between Latour and Nelson Goodman?

With regards to the fabrication of facts? The fabrication of facts. But the thing with that Nelson Goodman is a fundamental rationalist. In a very almost, I would say, constructivist sort of way. Yes, actually, Nelson Goodman is irrealist. is irrealist, totally irrealist. He thinks that realism is for cowards, right? Because why do you actually talk about realism if you already have the structure of the world, right? So there is a

way that facts about the world are being fabricated. But for him, this fabrication is not such a, you know, haphazard way like Latour, everyone interacting, non-human agent forces, bacteria, amoeba, there is a zebra in my panties, and so on and so forth, right? He actually understands that world making essentially involves in creation of world versions. These are frameworks of knowing about the world, like satellites that you launch against into the high orbit. And from there, you actually take pictures of the planet and you actually

reveal the sort of problems that couldn't otherwise be discovered if you were living on the planet. So you are fabricating facts, and there would be different, and he has this, you know, the famous chapter that, Cassia, you know that, you know, he compares the Ptolemaic system with the Copernican system, right? I mean, from a historical perspective, Julian Bauer actually makes it quite clear. The Copernican system is not actually supplant, does not supplant the Ptolemaic system. It rectifies the Ptolemaic framework by way of tweaking the equations of motions which were available at the time of Ptolemaic system.

Now, Adolf Grunbaum also takes side with Goodman by saying that, look, there are certain sort of facts, well-respected questions about facts that you can formulate in the Ptolemaic system that you cannot actually formulate them in the Copernican system. But there are also well-respected facts and questions that we can formulate, fabricate in the Copernican system that you couldn't do it in the Ptolemaic system. The thing is that we should understand that fabrication of facts is part of truly, not in a negative sense of fabrication, fabrication in the sense that we construct things.

We construct certain sort of frameworks through which we come about with empirical facts. It's part of a theory making and ultimately, you know, Kepler shows that, you know, both Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system had actually constructed respectable, honest to God facts. It's just that their facts were just world versions. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with fabrication in the way that he wants to use it.

It just seems like his sort of disingenuous surprise at why this was taken the wrong way when the word has such negative connotations in English is a bit, right, is more the part. yeah he i genuinely think that really is is he's like he's like this could be an otherwise brilliant thinker who constantly unconsciously uh hits his own achilles heel right it's just like every move that he makes is just like self-destructive from confusing methodology with metaphysics, with this idea of plurality

of metaphysics, with the idea that he wants to be egalitarian, but his egalitarianism does not actually leave any sort of room for egalitarian action, right? because it completely annihilates the locus of human responsibility. And he also wants to have all the great world-making and stuff, fabrication of facts, but while, you know, basically having no sort of respect or understanding of hierarchical structural knowledge production.

You see, that sort of horizontalism, and that's an extreme case, though. I mean, there are different sort of horizontalism. But this sort of horizontalism that is so all-encompassing, it's just coming back to what we were talking about, anti-humanism and the project of immunization. It just completely destroys your egalitarian ambitions at the end of the road. Yeah, that I very much agree with, and was sort of what I was going for in that bit about Nietzsche. But let's just get the rest of the questions on Latour before we move. So Michael, you want to go?

Yeah, sorry. I think this is kind of a deepening or an elaboration of Cassia's question, which I really liked, that maybe will connect with world versions, which is I kind of got the sense that Latour wanted to distinguish facts and values. I don't think he said this but I almost felt like he wanted to say that values are kind of have an ontological status that is how you get the plurality like the different modes of existence adhere to values um and when we're trusting speech acts or whatever or giving reality to speech acts it's about those values and that that would be distinct from uh different facts that don't have that ontological status and and would it like produce different world versions and that wouldn't be like, that wouldn't be the source of ontological morality, like not world versions,

but rather the values. I'm wondering if that makes any sense. I don't know, Ressa, do you want to, it just seemed to me like he doesn't like the notion of fact as distinct from value, right? That this idea of transparent facts that persist in time or that don't, aren't sort of laden with the judgments of what it seems like. Yes, I mean, he has created enough amounts of horizontalization that at this point, he cannot actually distinguish fact from value.

and so this is this quite actually in par with a certain kind of Nietzschean Foucaultian moves that we have seen yeah that you know that's so the first classical humanism and the ascetic ideal, as Peter Wolfenbill calls it, ascetic ideal of value, right, in the traditional humanistic sense that's based on the idea of God, is going to pass the death of God with Nietzsche completely, then the re-evaluation of all values. And then with Foucault, you see that as if the human

had replaced the gods and with the honest lot of the empirical sciences, even those values that only the human can make are going away. I mean, that sort of, this is precisely because they are trying to attack, you know, the empirical transcendental doublet by way of a manental project. that sort of immanental project does not leave any room for actually accounting for the system of values. Any sort of values that are actually being understood as egalitarian ends of actor network theory are ad hoc introduced to the system.

yeah no i definitely yeah agree with that i mean it seems like so with the nietzsche stuff his point to me seems to be that like values are lived not not fought or discussed right that the distinction between action and value so the the positive valuation simply is a mode of life simply is acting and it seems like Latour to say that that non-human objects have values in the way that they that interact because they act upon one another right yeah the mountain has has a value in in persisting and it takes the risk of persisting at every moment from moment to moment it

it takes the risk of continuing to be there that that sort of that kind of flattening it both gets absurd, but it does participate in this greater mistake of... The thing is that, I mean, people like, I would say, Latour, Rosie Bredotti, they do actually are completely aware that they are not supposed to, because it looks really bad on paper, to anthropomorphize, you know, values of a mountain resisting against deforestation and all these sort of stuff, right? But regardless of that, there is no other way. They are ending up anthropomorphizing. No matter how much

you say that, oh, I am not anthropomorphizing such relations. You see, that is the thing, is that, you know, the moment, I mean, Rosie particularly is very sensitive to this problem. She calls about a post-anthropocentric post-humanism, right? In the sense that all of this stuff that we are talking about have residues of classical anthropomorphization project. But I just genuinely cannot understand how you can actually move toward these deep ends of post-humanism while not doing once in a while some anthropomorphic gimmicks

for fun of it. Well, so the problem doesn't seem to me to be the anthropomorphism per se, because you could make the argument that all of our concepts, all of our talk about the world is analogical from practical. Yes, yes, yes. But what they do, then the move they do is to say, and we don't have the authority to determine what are good or bad uses of the concepts. We can just apply them without, and no one has the right to say, because then you're being anthropocentric, right? You are actually a rationalist, universalist anthropocentric, which is the worst sin.

But then, yes, it comes back to this that what is exactly, so with Latour, what is exactly scientific about your method? With Rosie Braidetti, what is exactly egalitarian and emancipatory about your method? because you end up refining and naturalizing the very relations that have already existed under the hood Kenneth did you want to yeah as always I will just pre-announce my naivete because well and I guess the only thing I wanted to ask or kind of bring in is that I've read Latour before and, you know, kind of, for me, there's something always very odd because

that there's, it feels kind of right, which I know isn't helpful or useful, but I'm just wondering, like, what? It absolutely always feels right to me too. That's why I'm in love with this guy already. Is there a way to salvage the parts of it that feel like it's pointing to something, even if it's not providing the kind of schema for how to engage it or respond to it or manage to it. Like, I'm actually going to, in the chat, there's, I was actually excited to see this. There was a kind of big time story about this huge kind of like campaign called Birds Aren't Real. And it's this kind of attempt to undermine this like, you know, QAnon misinformation thing. And I just think

this this rupture of this idea that access to information inherently creates objectivity I think that that's something he's Latour's pointing to that I do see and feel and I guess that's the part that I'm wondering if there's a way to hold on to that as useful yeah I go on go on Aaron Yeah, I would just say first, I also the first time I encountered Latour, just like more than a decade ago was quite attracted to some ideas there. I mean, certainly his critique of what you might call sort of scientism or naive empiricism is correct.

It just doesn't, it seems like this is not a view that sort of any kind of philosopher of science could hold today. It seems like he's sort of responding to a dated conception that, sure, there are probably lots of people in public who think this way, and it's useful to have someone as a public figure sort of debunking naive ideas of how scientific institutions work and what authority we grant them. But to me, I guess the democracy of objects idea, what was attractive about it to me was that it would give greater epistemological authority to scientists, right?

When I first encountered the idea, the concept that we could include within our sphere of political representation and conversation, the actual sort of material events taking place so that a senator from Arkansas or West Virginia who goes on about how coal is clean energy and fracking is great would have to sort of go up against the actual, like the promise of this idea to me seemed to be like giving equal status to this kind of sort of documentable scientific fact and and sort of our in our political conversation and that his solution to this is to sort of reject

any sense of that scenic authority of one over another and just create this kind of flat world in which we respect it all equally and don't step on anyone's toes so that we can believe in angels and and like the greenhouse gas effect and and how do we negotiate between angels and the greenhouse gas effect i i just don't see how that helps in the political conversation that he he does seem to want to promote. And similarly with this idea of legal representation using the fiction of legal personhood. Legal personhood certainly is a fiction

and one that functions in lots of ways. It's a good tool. I guess someone from New Zealand wanted to school me about New Zealand politics last week. But this idea of sort of incorporating That was emulat probably. Yeah, incorporating a public park so that we can better prevent people from sort of despoiling it and treating it as a resource for oil drilling seems like a good tool. But it It papers over the real ability of how we do that in practice.

You do need people to represent these things. You do need people to oversee and make decisions. You can't just declare a forest a person and then all of this requires a real conception of agency and a real negotiation of who is the authority to enact it on behalf of some other proposed object. It just doesn't seem like the political solutions he wants could possibly follow through from his proposed metaphysical means. He was good at diagnosing certain problems, but at least from my perspective, when I looked into these problems, the actual answer was being more serious about what our responsibilities

as rational actors are in a fundamentally sort of normative world based on trust, where sort of scientific institutions and reason is fundamentally normative as well, right? that this sort of pragmatic picture of what reason is as fundamentally a normative activity first and then theoretical as a analogical extension of our normative capacities seems to do the work that he can't do and to give a natural explanation of what values and reason are that you can give a scientific account of and that he's not interested. But, yeah. I mean, there is another also thing here.

I mean, this whole notion of information is fundamentally inflated. In the sense that, what do we actually mean by information? You know, big data, right? So, obviously, yeah, sure. Science works with information in the sense of big data. But that's not a part of this story or not the whole of this story. Precisely because what Latour really hates is that science does actually embrace theory formation. Theory formation requires absolute trust in nodes of epistemic authority.

certain sort of hierarchization should be in place not a control hierarchy but a hierarchization nonetheless and he does not want to have that in fact he does not want to have you know the knowledge dimension the knowledge spaces of of science the sort of knowledge and spaces that science makes to the, you know, the toil of theory formation. And yes, at that point, information just becomes unintelligible. And science does not actually work with information only.

That would be just, you know, like sorcery and that sort of stuff, you know. And I remember that his account, he says somewhere, look, you know, for example, critical sociology has never been a total inclusive science, precisely because it has not included things like spirits, ghosts, ghosts of ancestors, ghosts of my grandmother, and so on and so forth. My God, Almighty Lord. Then he says that basically critical sociology as a science, hence is not a science precisely because it always attributes a negative status to such entities.

But we need more information about them. And we need to include them because otherwise it wouldn't be an inclusive science. Hence it wouldn't be science in the first place. Yeah, I guess the other thing that strikes me is thinking back to this sort of object-oriented moment and Quentin Meizu's after Finitude, the sort of motivation that he gives for wanting to extend the world to this outside, is precisely to sort of counter the authority of theology. He's like, Kant has prevented us

from being able to fundamentally do away with these religious irrationalists. This is what I remember from that book, which I encountered around the same time, about a decade ago, But that like the reasons that this so-called movement couldn't stick together. I mean, you have Latour on the one side being like, we need to open up space to recognize the equal truth of religion in our fundamentally chaotic world. And the other is, no, we need to recognize our fundamentally chaotic contingent world because then that's the only way to finally do away with the dangerous illusion of God. Yes, yes, yes. it's essentially a backdoor theology at the end of the day,

a backdoor theology. And they accuse, you know, anti-humanism, post-humanism, non-humans, each other, like that they are doing backdoor humanism, but what they are actually doing, all of them are backdoor theology. That's what backdoor theology is, you know, introducing those insidious ideas back into the discussion after they have been fully on a philosophical ground has been resolved. And the thing is that, I mean, I completely agree with someone like Rosie that, look, we keep the idea of we as human open, as open as possible.

keep the door open never let it close just maybe you should actually just close it this bit so someone actually slips in I completely agree with that sort of idea but the thing is that they are not really satisfied or they cannot actually explain why the door should be closed why because any sort of vestige of humanism you think that is oppressive in its nature of what, for what reason are you going to open the door, which I think the door should remain open, half closed, so to speak, but there is no fundamental explanation, an actual justification

that why the door should remain open for the idea of we, when we speak of we, we humans, well yeah i think we talked about this a bit last week as well that if we want to be naturalists and we want to have a sort of real functional description of what how we is made and what it means to participate in we um this requires us in some ways to be to be ableists right like that like to participate in we and to be like to be a part of we is to be able to participate in but not ableist in the cognitive sense able not in the agential sense of human right

because that would be disabled other things right so so there is you see there is a sort of kind of maneuvering here uh that there is a complete ableist discourse in this in this thing right but also it has that sort of fundamental humanist ableism in it right first of all I mean there is for example Rosie talks about this that you know we should actually and this is Stephen Shaviro's slogan as well that look we absolutely do not need to talk about cognition right okay

let's not talk about cognition cognition is quite embodied so on so forth uh but but of course we can talk about it philosophically what do you actually mean by cognition at that level and which stage what uh um the fact that they misunderstand the distinction between mere cognition in a naturalized order of things and the production of intelligible makes them quite prone to this idea that I have seen this unfortunately with Carl Sachs as well to either go become fully cybernetic,

fully machinic, right, technological mediated cognition, or the idea that, no, just get rid of it all. Get rid of it. Accept that cognition in any sort of way, whether as intelligible production, production of intelligibilities or mere sort of cognition, being self-aware, they're all residues of some sort of humanistic illusion. Either way, they actually, both the cybernetic ends, the machinic cybernetic ends, the cyborgian ends, and this sort of, what you might call to be liberal object democracy

ends up with the idea, ends up with this problem that it cannot adjudicate what is actually intelligent. You know, and once there is no criteria for adjudication of that which is intelligible, then you obviously have to bring in Popeyes, spirits of ancestors, ghost of grandnanny and so on so forth there is no other way around it it's an inevitable move yeah in some ways i feel like afro pessimism is the most sort of intellectually interesting example of this maybe in in which sort of intelligent like unintelligibility is sort of

universalized right the sort of conceptual games you have to play and these are all kind of high Degarion strategies, the sort of decolonial thinking does this as well, but where you have to make unintelligibility both sort of your fundamental concept of what is and what is universal and the exception and the exclusion is the problem, right? You have to play this game to avoid participating in the universal by arguing with it, right? You have to make this fundamental claim about what you are and what you want, that it's fundamentally unintelligible. And this is where you get this kind of negative messianism, this sort of bad Benjamin, where we lack the imaginary to create the politics we want.

But when we destroy this world, the new one will come into being. But we can't concretely talk. Seems to me the strategy there. But I admire the sort of creative way that certain kinds of kind of anti-humanist theory have to have to craft their concepts to avoid falling into the Hegelian trap. Yes, yes. Of once you argue with the universal on its terms, you're there, you're done, like you're in. You're getting assimilated by it, yes. Yeah, the dialectic has you and you can't get away. like yes no i mean the same thing happens with you know anti-humanists with regard to the question of power uh i mean power is supposed to have certain sort of explanatory status with regard to material

relations so on and so forth but precisely by virtue of it being fundamentally emptied of any sort of intelligible criteria for finding what is intelligible. It simply starts to metastasize itself in the dark. It stops to be an explanatory power, but rather metastasize itself. okay uh let's have a break five minutes and then come back

i'm gonna stop from screen sharing but did everyone get the uh the pdf i sent or should i try to find another way to yeah yeah you got it it's good the discord yeah if you want who I can post it I don't know in classroom as well Discord is fine all right Aaron can I grab this chance to make a question yeah sure I was a bit shocked by your comparison of between Latour and Mainong's jungle do you think it really maps perfectly uh i i guess this is not something i'm i'm an expert in but it was more just sort of the

multiplication of entities right where you have this metaphysics that anything that right his is between the difference between the existence and persistence and so material objects persist but anything that we can we can invoke exists uh and so you get this metaphysics where you just start populating the world with all of these different existence and there's no end to how much that sort of that was the comparison there. Okay, I was under the impression and I haven't gone far in my knowledge, but it was enticing so far. I was under the impression that is their existing non-existence, although scary if taken as an ontological stance.

It is scary if it's taken as an ontological stance, you know, in a fat ontology. But if I was reading it at, you know, his claiming that at the higher level, at the representational level, you know, you could, I think Meinung is saying that you can have objects for a theory that do not exist. So in a way, by virtue of being able to work with them, they have a certain kind of being, even if provisional. Yeah, I haven't read Mainong directly. I've read about him in discussions about Husserl.

So yeah, I couldn't speak more directly to whether his sort of philosophy makes internal sense. But sort of, yeah, I thought of the comparison because of the way that these metaphysics sort of populate the world with and i i don't think i have a huge like harry potter exists in that like you can talk about harry potter in a real way and like it has affected people's lives and you can talk about like the reality of harry potter in one sense as long as you're like you're you're not you're not a 12 year old who believes that you could really get the letter to hogwarts or whatever but like yeah we could draw the distinction at uh harry potter exists but he's not true

yeah i mean so there are philosophical ways of doing that yeah i think the the reason people sort of react with absurdity to to meinong is yeah the idea that suddenly you'll just be forced to recognize all of these crazy entities. I'm trying to remember how else it fit in. It was, yeah, it was in a different class I was taking at some point on Frege and Josel. But that stuff's a bit rusty for me. Thank you. Eat a bit. Oh, I had another thing.

This room smells really nasty. So much cigarettes. I think that's an important sort of barrier. But deciding not to smoke indoors sort of saves me a lot of living in an apartment building as well. So I have to walk down the stairs. Oh, yes, yes. Particularly. Yes, yes. No. No, I mean, I never actually smoke inside. I actually go outside.

But the thing is that when it gets cold and you know that, you know, the New York, Connecticut, it just cannot go out. Oh, I always liked that aspect. of it actually you liked it oh my god you are total new yorker oh no i started smoking in connecticut actually the most derraria land ever existed on the planet uh-huh i have i have a lot of fun but it's yeah i have a lot of fun spending 10 minutes yeah i have a lot of fun memories of spending 10 minutes uh in the wind in chicago trying to light a cigarette worth it every time yeah chicago is a totally different just like winter in the midwest is is chicago is horrendous

i mean wasn't it like a few years ago that people started to die in classrooms because of cold i mean just imagine that you are actually part of my class in chicago and we die out of cold were you falling asleep accidentally yeah that was a part of the big teacher's strike in like 2016 or 17 or something i could be totally misremembering but i think that was a part of it yeah yeah you're just like oh wow my lectures must be so boring everyone's falling asleep oh my god no Chicago is uh my god and but but I remember Minnesota uh the worst the worst

like one of the coldest places in the whole continent because it's the farthest from the ocean yes and like so you just like I remember I was with Florian Hecker and we were going to somewhere I can't remember oh we were going to Whole Foods you know that in Germany they don't have Whole Foods so he likes to go to Whole Foods and we were going to Whole Foods and And I was completely like 500 layers of clothes and big boots and stuff. I simply literally thought that I cannot just walk anymore.

Like my entire body is being shut down. Metabolism is dead. Heart is flattening. It was utterly, I had never seen such a cold in my entire life. He didn't insist on opening the windows, did he? No, we were walking in the street. I mean, it was just horrible. It was a wind. I mean, that wind, Minnesotan wind, because of the lakes, I don't know what it is. It absolutely goes beneath any surface. Last year I was in Chicago with some Germans and they were very upset that they couldn't open the windows in their hotel room, which was like on the corner of the major avenue in Chicago and the wind just barreling down it.

And they're like desperately trying to freeze themselves to death so they can smoke out the window in their hotel room. But they do this like middle of December, if you're in a classroom in Germany during this pause the instructor would open all the windows in the room. Okay. I still I still go with Minnesota rather than London, UK and this sort of places. there is there is this thing that no matter uh people always say that you know that there is no bad weather uh there is only you know uh insufficient uh clothing that does not unfortunately apply to london it's just misery waves through you

in saint petersburg it is the same i have heard about this so ray uh ray brisier and i were invited uh by university of saint petersburg i would say six years ago i actually was smart enough to not go there so ray went there and ray so coming from uh the talk then they go to the bar and then he loses the address of the hotel and for three hours walking there is no cab in the cold at the height of uh winter my god he was saying that i'm not going to russia

ever again and there is a nevara river which is uh at winter it looks totally black that's why there are so many pessimistic guys there yes yes pessimistic mathematicians particularly in saint petersburg okay let's start uh um so some one of you uh uh fliko did you add a question i think you were raising your hand oh uh it wasn't a question i was just um i was uh going to uh uh it was an idea about what is wrong in latour and harley uh and i thought that uh

not theology think is worse than them, but their distrust to science. And I've read one paper about fictions and about modeling in sciences, which I don't remember the author, but it was about... Was it Weisberg? I don't remember. But it just said that when science uses a metaphor, it uses a model to explain something about the world.

like i don't know like we can uh take a model of uh uh of a figure quadratic quadratic figure to to explain some structure of how heideggerian ontology works and when we do this we have we have three steps in our thinking we have some complex ontology of heidegger then we we take that model to explain that it's not so complex

actually uh and uh okay so um and we have a more clear version of that ontology and then but uh when you use models in front of people like latour they just go they they're very angry about it and they say oh you believe in triangles you believe in that quadratic model don't you so so uh so harley is always uh saying that metaphors is uh something which is uh profoundly

good but she actually doesn't use metaphors to explain something. Yeah I mean one of my heroes of all time is Henri Poincaré and Poincaré is famous for being in conversation, one of the best scientists of all time, and not just scientists, an engineer, a theoretical physicist, a mathematician, talking to phenomenologists, to conventionalists of his time, like Hans Beyinger, Osserl, Boltzmann, so many other people.

uh uh and Poincarro always actually uh says that look uh models are absolutely fictions uh I mean is the the founder of of that sort of view uh that fictionalist school uh in sciences that the models are completely fiction. But he says that, you see, they are not just any sort of fiction. He actually, and this is coming when you see the trajectory, the lineage of Poincaré to today's, for example, French philosophers of mathematics and so on and

They are all influenced by him precisely because Poincaré actually thinks that anthropic perceptions of space and time are quite, are evolutive in a sense, right? and hence they have a certain sort of uniqueness to them because they have evolved over a long time and they are completely can be explained by natural sciences and he thinks that at some point natural sciences will actually explains why we have this sort of perception

of space and time and not others. But he thinks that any sort of fiction that we put into sciences, including geometrical figures or all that sort of stuff, have a certain co-evolutive memory with them that makes them actually work as opposed to any haphazard, whimsical fiction. Of course, this view has come under massive amount of criticism, particularly by Adolf Gurenbaum. But I think that, you know, yes, we should understand the power of metaphors in sciences.

A great deal of their potency is coming back to the fact that they are are evolutionarily entrenched. You know, and you can actually do a lot around something to unpack these sort of stuff that is happening around them. And this is this is Max's story that one of the greatest ideas of science is that for the first time science after Boltzmann becomes truly scientific in the sense that so we are using certain sort of perceptions of time

to describe a series of events in an analytic sense right and science actually has the sort of capacity to not actually take for granted this sort of fictions and hence according to mark is that then science becomes the science of a new experience just imagine that you could completely interrogate the fictions of time that we have and the sort of systems that we have made around them if you could interrogate so thoroughly by way of science such fictions such that we can

show that there is a possibility that these are fictions and not facts of experience, then we could arrive at new facts of experience and hence a new system of science. Harry Potter is real. So, any more questions, anything, or should I start? I wanted to ask earlier for clarification on something. Sure, sure. You said really briefly about leaving the door open for we, and you were saying that there wasn't like proper justification, or I wasn't sure exactly what you said around it, but there's

No, I would, yes, yeah, absolutely. I would say that. You see, so opening or not letting the door completely closes, right? You know, always have closed such that the idea we can be enriched, right? by itself I would say that so of course we know the motivation behind that that you know think about our own human history that you know the others that we have always treated as subhumans subcitizens should come in right but the thing is that so on on the paper this is yeah looks

completely right right but the thing is that at which point we say that this idea of we is very specific and not fully inclusive in the terms of the sort of judgments that we can make and other things cannot make like a rock cannot actually make a judgment right uh so you let everything in you let everything in that's looks good completely great magnificent but then this if you do not understand the idea of the judgment about we just like the judgment eye

judgments, then a scenario can happen where you have diluted the concept of we so much that you no longer have a justification as who is oppressed and should be let in, and according to what differences, right? I mean, this comes back to what I have been already talking about that the concepts such as the concept of agency unfortunately are very tricky slippery concepts uh they have been invented for a reason uh to be plastic protein but not inflationary they are actually deflationary concepts

If you dilute the concept of agency too much, you actually end up to be reifying or hypothesizing the very means of oppression. the sort of power relations that only an agency can detect, an irrational agency by that I mean, not an actant in a Latourian sense. I don't know. I mean, maybe Aaron, any of you can talk about this. I mean, can we ask for example ourselves that

what would be could be you know if we didn't have invented the concept of agency for ourselves could be better off Sahaj. Thanks Reza. So, I mean, actually I completely agree with you in that sense about, you know, about bringing agency, like, you know, I mean, not sort of this entire conversation hinging on actants or agency. And I mean, that personally, that's why, like, you know, the labor of the

inhuman, I think it's like kind of groundbreaking in that sense, because like, you're kind of uncoupling reason from this entire thing of who gets to act as reason. And it's not even like, you know when we bring so to speak when we bring in the non-human into the domain of uh reason and rationality uh we are not even imposing like you know it sort of becomes a meeting halfway in a sense where uh um you know like we sort of collectively kind of arrive at the space of reason uh as opposed to kind of bringing in things and like by consequence sort of anthropomorphizing them because you're essentially just going to end up imposing a very anthropomorphic

version of reason and rationality onto the rock or the ocean or things like that, or AI for that matter. In fact, one way in which we see this happening right now is the way in which AI is kind of already being used as a tool for surveillance and things like that. Or like, you know, to kind of, I mean, like Pegasus is a really good example, actually, in terms of how it essentially is just like kind of furthering, it's like AI being used as a tool is, even though it's brought into the domain of like sort of thinking, it's still being used to reify human kind of essentialism and it's sort of subsumed under that narrative.

So yeah, I do think that like, I mean, there's a kind of meeting halfway sort of, you know, to this sort of space of reason needs to happen on both sides. That seems like the only way out in a way almost. I see. I see. I mean, look, probably, you know, Saej or many of you that actually, I mean, the whole idea of, you know, intelligence and spirit is not about AGI, even though it is actually a book about AGI. It's not really about AGI. It's simply what I would call to have a world version or series of world versions of the framework known as human, such that we can renegotiate the idea of human.

Otherwise I'm not really interested in this sort of mumbo-jumbo and voodoo. sounds to me very parochial. I mean, yeah, sure, AI has a magnificent future, but nothing. Chomsky always, I love Chomsky for being the most boring person on the planet, in the sense that everyone always asks Chomsky, so Chomsky, do you really think that AI reaches the status of, you know, artificial general intelligence? Yeah, I think so. But it would be around like a thousand years from now. So you're all dead.

So yes, for me, the problem of artificial intelligence is actually an opportunity to create satellites, world versions, to look at the framework problem, namely the human. Otherwise, I mean, hence, it is only, it has for me, I'm not talking about other people, for me, it only has a self-interrogative, self-renegotiating value and utility, nothing more. Sorry for being so boring on this topic.

And what was it? The other one, I mean, what is Haraway's term for in making a species? ontological choreographies is that is that right i think that's that's that's the term about the idea we right and she always talks about difference that makes a difference yeah so is she's not totally delusion or she's not really whimsical saying that any difference would be good.

Deleuze wouldn't have said it either. So she always talks about the difference that makes a difference and all these inclusions should be understood as differences that make cumulative differences. But the thing here is quite suspicious in the sense that if we dilute the idea of we, maybe not we, but the concept of agency that many of these people have a problem with, then at that point, when or where do you know a difference make a difference?

Right? naturalizing naturalizing the inclusivity is the worst sin in philosophy we we ought not to naturalize relations with other sorts of others because that already hypothesize the very instruments of oppression the only way out of it is to unbound reason from human um i guess akshat has a question

right um so i was just like my dear sir turn on your video you're very handsome don't worry uh i think it's not turning on for some reason don't worry again um so um for like um when you ask the question uh like did we make would we be better off without agency and the cell phone and like uh like just as a general question for me that always maybe goes back to how would we account for um responsibility and like what um obligation

and responsibility what arguments would you make like i know this is very philosophy 101 and like i'm talking about p zombies or um like essentially no quality quality and something very basic but like how would you like even now when we look at like simple ai it's like if you use an ai to kill someone it's not a murder it's an industrial accident so essentially we would be living in a world with people where like let's not call it industrial accident but then it would be an accident essentially it would be an accident i mean isn't it isn't it really uh the old u.s military apparatus like a few children here and there die and look we blame it on technical

accidents. Difficulties. Yeah, very casualties. So it's like maybe a little Japanese Buddhist. Nature takes care of them. A little like Japanese Buddhism, like Zen Buddhism is also lingering around the edges of this argument. But basically I just think of agency and self-worth as like maybe how would we like hold people responsible for their actions? And like psychology plexes me a lot because of this because if we go down the route of determinism we can essentially even see what abuses or what specific socio-political,

geopolitical and religious circumstances resulted in the creation of let's say someone who's like a horrible pedophile or a murderer of like a cannibal or someone who takes the worst pleasure. Exactly. Peter Iskali is like the worst monster ever. So we just like, when we take these things, there is always this desire to say that we can't hold these people completely responsible for what they have done because they themselves were victims and abused people. but then again like maybe for me it's basically about responsibility absolutely yes yes uh i mean

this is this is uh this is a very good uh topic and i mean i i don't have that much to talk about this but i mean yes i mean one of the greatest um ways that these monsters can always uh you know, basically justify their actions is by saying that, look, we are living in a very natural order of things. And this has happened. This has happened. Causal, they attribute every sort of decision that they have ever made to causal laws, rather than normative decisions.

and intentionality and you know uh i was uh just a few days ago i was uh watching this youtube with peter scully and my god this is this man is just like the most horrific person ever lived on this planet like literally and he says i'm going to actually write a diary of my uh exploits and why I actually did all of this. And he's quite apologetic, but apologetics by virtue or in virtue of certain sort of determinations, participation with non-human actors,

the forces that made me who I am. Right? He naturalizes, he absolutely, in a very scientific way naturalizes his fucking decisions i'm not supposed to say something like that but you know there are people who are non-personal grata on this planet and he's one of them And so many people like that. Right. Going back to the we thing, though, I feel like keeping the door open for we can be a catalyst to extend responsibility because that often comes from,

you know, when you're not responsible for something that's othered, that comes from this, like, unrelatability. So I feel like... Possibility, Paige, is a judgment, right? And I actually do agree with Metzinger that we are the sort of stupid animals that only 2% of our life actually is spent on actual rational judgments. The rest is just like, boo, AI goes bare, alertness goes bare. but nevertheless that is the reason why we have to unbind the judgment and reason rational judgment from our animal selves

to give a certain sort of autonomy to reason itself otherwise i mean whatever we do is doomed there is no hope in humanity humanity is a very diseased animal i do believe it but that is not really to get disappointed about humans or rise against them It's just that we have to have the bravery, and I'm not calling it bravery, maybe that's a much a word.

A certain sort of accountability to deal with the sort of things that we do in this universe. and that cannot be demolished cannot be diluted by or cannot be resolved by letting other actors in actants in it can it can so we can learn scientifically and yeah but but only in in the sense of science what science does not produce empirical sciences do not produce values they can inform it, they do not produce it. Rationality is the only thing that we have.

And that rationality is quite bounded, is quite weak. I mean, the fact that we haven't make moon gulags is quite hopeless. that was a joke by the way so um uh maria and uh and i know that someone is among us who has been very silent and he's always actually have something to say arman so you are going to talk after uh maria uh and my irish friend that would be your turn

What I wanted to say was that there was a very standard concept of agency, Aristotelian one, that whose speech is intelligible in a political sense, whose speech we understand and know their political will. But the question again is who we know that one's speech. Is there a possible machine that will know the political will of everyone, everything, including rocks, including mountains, and so on? This is unlikely because they do not produce science. So under this hypothesis, I'm very pessimistic as for the inclusion of everything into this

concept of political we. That's what I wanted to say. I see, I see. Yeah, I mean, there should be a, I think Saj was right, there should be a middle ground here, that there should be a certain sort of inclusivity, but not a zombie inclusivity. It should be a fundamentally of rational judgment. And then, of course, people don't like rational judgment because that reintroduces the idea of rational agency uh to the equation the formula and many people think that rational agency is the classical version of human right the the rational

animal the god-given uh pupil of the sky daddy and so on so forth but no that is why uh we are going to go to Peter Wolfundale and Ray next session to show that no, inclusion of rational justification and rational judgment does not entail the revival of the classical picture of the human. In fact, it is as Olaf S. Stapleton understood it. It will crush the face of portrait of human against the stars. Foucault's wager at the end of order of things,

but taken to galactic proportions. My dear sir. Yeah, Reza, I was thinking when you were talking about um when when you were saying what you were saying just a moment ago um i'm kind of wondering whether whether you subscribe then to what brandon has to say in his paper heroism and magnanimity magnanimity where he talks about the kind of heroism of agency which accepts responsibility for knowledge of the conditions in which an agent acts um so he i think in that paper is drawing on what um i guess on a kind of hegelian position and it's it's been a while i was just kind of

of looking briefly at it, but it's been a while since I read it. But what I can remember was essentially that he starts from the classical Greek conception of agency and moral responsibility when he talks about Oedipus and Oedipus is kind of viewed in this classical sense to be responsible for the things that befall him. Whereas a more kind of modern conception of agency would say that no, no, Oedipus was fated to, you know, fall into these kinds of circumstances. And so he's therefore morally exonerated for having, you know, essentially no kind of, for having been causally motivated, or for want of a better word, to act in the ways that he did. And so I think what Brandon wants to affirm, going through Hegel is a conception of agency that, you know, in some

sense, nevertheless takes responsibility for the world in which, you know, Oedipus acts based on certain kind of ability to know about it, which isn't just about the kind of, you know, it kind of gets outside of this mechanical causal view. I mean, I don't really know where I was going with with the question and such, but yeah, I think I think I can understand the question and please do correct me if I'm wrong. To me, Brandon, good almighty, dignitary old man. that sort of heroism to me is an empty thing it is essentially a story it's it's it's the

the product of weak historicism uh progress right i don't actually believe in that sort of uh stuff. I would actually say that the question, the philosophical question of agency was a very fundamental invention, but as all inventions is going to be supplanted by something better, something more robust, more protein, and so on and so forth. Yet we have not come across with that sort of concept yet, but it will definitely, I actually take side with Foucault,

that that concept will be destroyed in its entirety, but not because of some sort of anti-humanist or post-humanist zeal, but out of the very recognition of what we are not by virtue of reason. Yeah, Brandon is too heroic for his own sake. You know, it is always so great to be an old man, a dignitary with a great magnificent beard and talk about the heroism of fucking agency.

because it seems like the bar that he places even on the kind of knowledge that would inform this in order to make it a sort of an apt heroism is yeah i mean he talks about it kind of accepting the tragedy of fate but i think the stakes are much higher for somebody who not find themselves the stakes are absolutely at this point are literally higher than even fuko could understand that i mean the concept of human absolutely will be destroyed not by annihilation not by extinction but simply by way of understanding decoupling as pete has talked about it decoupling

the horns of the dilemma, transcendental, empirical transcendental doublet. To unbind the transcendental is absolutely catastrophic, anastrophic, whatever you call it, for humans. it would it would require us to make a new form a new concept for obligation and responsibility agency I do agree with post-humanism that is not a sufficient concept but unfortunately it is the concept that we can use at this point and we should use uh otherwise we get into the vagaries

of thought and so on so forth as Kant would have uh warned uh but it is no it's not sufficient it's going to go it's going to evaporate absolutely not in our lifetime but eventually it is already we are seeing the the you know the writings on the wall at this point with regard to who we are you know one of the worst things that happened to humanity which was the most blessing thing was that we think who we are

and then we see who we actually are. The rift between these two is extending and is becoming escalated, aggravated, and at some point, we can no longer actually say who we are. by mere whim of thinking through the idea that, you know, we are the locus of responsibility and obligation. Locus of responsibility and obligation is literally not a human thing. It's by every definition something beyond the human.

perhaps Nietzsche tried to say something some give us some warnings but he made mistakes and he went back to some sort of theology 101 I just literally think that you know that within the concept of the human there lies a fundamental abyssal concept of the inhuman agency and it's not really agency anymore it's something that we have to understand by the power of judgments and reasons but that does not actually work for us mere humans precisely because we are completely entrenched within

the sort of reasoning that we give historically and evolutionary. Carnap made a prediction about this. And you know that, you know, that there would be different grades of rationality, the different concepts of rationality in participating in a community as an agent. We are most probably at the level one or two of this participation. Like think about the, what's that, the Russian guy who talks about different levels

of intelligence, intergalactic intelligence, which died a couple of years ago. Someone help me, please. Stanislav Lin? No, no. Kardashev. Yeah. I mean, this also shows that the sort of philosophical problems that we are working with while absolutely need to be kept alive and constantly renegotiating them so on so forth

but we should understand that at some point such philosophical concepts cease to exist not by sciences but by fundamentally new concepts of philosophy the future philosophy has not arrived yet and we are happy for that you don't want to be there if those if those concepts arrive okay next question yes it could be a little bit naive but i cannot help thinking about the problem of evil i mean

in the in the in the boundaries of merrius and kant is thinking about the source of evil and he makes this distinction between animality humanity and the persona and he said that the source of evil should be found in the persona because the persona is that stage of whatever we are that is responsible for his or for its acts. And it has all to do with the problem of evil naturally and also with the problem of the rational reason, the practical reason. So it seems to me that, I don't know again if this is quite naive,

but it seems to me that we have been walking around this problem for several seasons and I don't know what you think about that. Yeah, well, hard to say. I mean, one of the things, unfortunately, that I absolutely have never touched philosophically is the problem of evil. I mean, I know that different philosophers like Plato, like Kant, have touched on it. but this unfortunately is something that is i have never touched precisely because i think it's i don't know i don't want to say that either too intricate or rather it is modeling

an already muddled water i don't know i don't know so uh forgive me for not having an answer to this question i don't know but yeah i can understand uh you know what you're getting at uh unfortunately this is not something that i have thought about i mean systematically Aaron? I want Armin to talk. I also want Armin to come at me. Armin, do you have something to say?

If not, I can go back on Brandom, but go for it. Yeah, I wanted to say something about Brandom also. So my problem is mostly technical today because I don't have a mouse. You know, I know this is a foolish problem, but I don't have a mouse. So I have to remotely manipulate my computer from my phone. And it's really stupid. Anyway. You have relinquished the double click. Yeah. I don't have a double click anymore. But I want to say something about Random, too. Because I don't think Random talks about this. I don't think his position is heroism, per se. He's like he actually unwind this problem in a, of course, hegelian manner that the valley and the hero are both two sides of the same coin and stuff and magnanimity is supposed to be the problem, the element that would solve the problem.

But I wouldn't talk to that anymore, I'm sure Aaron knows more. I just wanted to say something about what actually Reza said at the start of the class about the rationalist metaphysicians of critical philosophy. And that stuck with me through the class. Because I think there's something very that I've been trying to say as Diego put it through the whole sessions, I personally I don't know how to say it because it's very difficult for me. But I think to what Reza said as the revenge of Kant and I try to reformulate my problem and make it into question to say if anybody has anything to say about it.

So for Leibniz or Wolf or especially maybe even Descartes and Spinoza, what is the methodological move that later Kant moves against as much as I know? Is or my understanding is, as much as my understanding goes of it is that element of all that is a totality that is the requirement of reason in rationalism the totality in for for any of these metaphysicians is some kind of god

specifically for lightness which who's who i'm reading lately i have never read him He's incredible, also very, the most fearful philosopher I've ever read was like this. If the word was like it's a metaphysics, that would be the horrible word, not the best of the words. But anyway, for all of them, this idea of all or whole or totality is present and can be used to justify reasons, justify actions, norms and all of that. Kantor is trying to do, if I understand him and Reza's idea about revenge correctly, is to say that no, that element cannot be reached and cannot be adjusted, cannot be used to justify any other

kind of empirical in space and time possible consistent and complete human understanding or human experience in the world. So this movement of Kant and methodologically for Kant was to not start from the basic principles, but as we know Hegel then argued that yes he did and stuff like that. We don't touch that part, but what I'm going to say is that if we move transcendentally about good for example that the next the the week before we were talking about if we make the good

transcendental to judgments then we make this move that can't was what was really about not to make because he said that if you that that understanding that um that you know saying that i have of can maybe maybe it's not true but anyway that would be a critical move to reason or good because there would be there wouldn't be any any form of the good anymore what Plato talked about the good itself would be the form of judgment if I understand correctly then the good would be what we have or we have already and always did have that that is that is the difficulty of the the idea of the transcendental good so what we need here is to is to uh I understand the lator art of maybe I'm

talking too much um anyway that was what that was what that was the reformulating uh idea that i think um may i may actually uh reformulate what you said and please do tell me if i'm making uh vast mistakes sorry sorry but would you would you first best tell me that where i was i was wrong because you do this very kind no no no no no no i will actually this is this time is actually i'm saying that you are completely right. You see, what Kant did was exactly what Marx did years, years after Kant. Essentially, so what does Kant do with regard to pre-critical philosophy?

The totality of reason a la rational metaphysics is at hand, and Kant makes sure that that sort of totality of judgments, rational judgments, is an illusion. And rational judgments can only be a totalizing movement. And this is exactly what Marx says with regard to communism in German ideology, right? Communism is not a state of fear, but a movement that abolishes every totality of things as we know it. Aaron. Oh dear, there's a lot.

And I'm also getting signals that I should go outside. But let's let's try to keep up. So first on the brand heroism point. Oh, you can hear the whining, can't you? Don't worry about it. You have some responsibility. I know. There's species responsibility. Right. Let me put the headphones back on. But so with Brandom on heroism, I think you're misinterpreting that, Reza. I guess I haven't read that specific paper, the heroism and magnanimity, but I am going off what Armin was referencing, the genealogy and the hermeneutics of magnanimity paper.

and my apologies if you want my reference it's the first chapter of uh spirit and trust of trust um yeah i need to projects among projects but um as i understand it the the heroism bit it is a perspectival uh aspect to it right we can give the same description heroism isn't necessarily a description of the actions of the hero. Right. It's an act of interpretation and it's the rational, it's the rational stance. To take the rational stance with regard to, say, an institution or a given value is to

give the heroic interpretation. as opposed to the, I guess the Hegelian terms are like Edelmüdig and Niedrich, right? Yeah. Yeah. But it's like to give the sort of magnanimous or noble description of action or to give a sort of deflationary or one that sort of pulls down the description, right? So we have the hero in his valet and the hero saves the damsel in distress and the valet can say, well, it's because he wanted to sleep with her or because he had a good breakfast. I made him a good breakfast to sausages this morning and he feels heroic when he eats sausages.

and if I were to have just made him eggs and no sausages he wouldn't have done it like you can always give these like Hegel does incorporate this kind of perspectivism that all of the kind of anti-humanist critics are looking for they say no the real yeah unfortunately that is the whole fine Achilles heel of that sort of rhetoric you know perspectivism of history but but this is what's so strong about hegel right is that like reason just is another perspective but it is the perspective that allows us reason is actually not a perspective it's the most a perspectival thing that could ever exist because perspectivalism is essentially as

sellers would have said it something like representation and concepts are not representations You see? Perhaps it's a misformulation on my part, but I guess the point I wanted to make was that like what taking this stance, right, taking the rational stance is what allows us to reconcile contrasting perspectives and push them in forms that I toward an ideal, right? Like we want to promote heroism because we want people to save other people when they're danger and giving the heroic account is what like allows us to better sort of cultivate the virtue of doing virtuous acts. Right there's always a util like there is a there's a kind of training

that goes on with the rational account of an institution and I guess I forget where I encountered but sort of believing that an institution can be held account to its values. Yes but that is my problem with unfortunately brandon so let's go that heroism of course brandon does not actually mean the heroism of the person who's a perceptive rational agent not entirely it is a heroism actually of socialities makes an individual very quite hegelian right institutes institutions and so on so forth but then if you are actually some sort of really evil marxist

into communization theory you ask yourself so okay now okay now what actually happens when the institutes are persons replicating institutes, power material relations, and institutes replicating the power material relations among the people. What is a heroism here? Right? I actually think that communization theory, even though Rob Lucas, who is a friend, doesn't believe anymore in communization theory in that sort of extreme uh jean camant sort of

sense but i think it's actually quite a very very sort of uh troubling problem here you know uh i think that marx was right uh and to a certain extent all to serve but the thing is that if the problem is right does it mean that we should actually get rid of the whole concept of agency and the heroism of asianhood out of the window i would say not for now i'd like to hear more how you think sort of altissero is right or what i mean so i i under

the problem with Brandon's account is that he doesn't give us the resources for dealing with an institution that we think is like should be done away with right it is just this kind of conservative inclusive progressive humanism where we talked about sort of last week in the terms of defining my apologies uh essentially Brandon is Rosie Braiducky of humanism including zombie institutes just like you include zombie non-human actors no but yeah i would i think this sort of marxist supplement to this hegelianism about what like what the kind of rational proposiveness that we actually want to promote and that actually sort

is agency is a better way of sort of allows us to judge what institutions we want to keep and what we want to get rid of and that we have can formulate in autonomous terms the sort of sort of what what good uses of of our sort of rational energy and social interaction and and proposiveness are. Yeah, it seems to me like Brandon's weakness is that he doesn't try to sort of include a Marxist account of this, I think. Because it's so, you see, the problem with Brandon is that he reads all the goddamn times Marxists

through a genealogical critique. And yes, leftists are actually need to be holden, responsible for random being scared by this whole marxist account because it's just like genealogical critique 101 but it's not really it is actually about the entanglement imbrications between material conditions and rational conditions and uh this is why i think that that post-humanism to a certain extent is right and so is marxism i mean post-humanism is nothing but uh marxism on a steroid really i mean that's that's what it is if you think about it

a certain source of penchant for materialism but not fully but not fully but not fully So you need to have still some subjects here and there are some notion of diluted agency over there to make thing to make sure that things actually do work. Right. But it doesn't. Yeah, we're getting blackmailed. I guess what I was going to I don't think Kirill is here anymore because he keeps bringing it up as well. I do think sort of Martin Higlund does the kind of best to date sort of Marxist reading of random. You see, my problem with Martin is that, not personally, but his book, is that it's a very good account.

It's not pessimistic enough. he actually tries too hard to be over optimistic about this whole thing you know philosophers have no truck with goddamn unjustified optimism yeah as i said a lot of caution and a lot of risk appetite takes one to be a philosopher Well, I think the real critique you would, I would make of him, and in this sense with the optimism is about the sort of possibility of, of communism as the sort of non coercive pluralistic political order. Right when when sort of he's very clear that the space of

reasons is unitary, like, It is unitary, but what is it? I mean, the thing about I mean, you I've already seen and I know that so many of you are into this sort of unconditional accelerationism and stuff, you know, at least are familiar with that. Luke, does unitary space of reason translate to unitary space of political acts? Yeah. I mean, probably, probably does. If, as Hegel would have said that, you know,

that unitary space is yet abstractly determined and it needs to be rendered concrete. But then that transition to the concreteness requires to accept the fact that the space of reason and the material space of relations are somehow commingled at some point. And then you have no choice other than being a goddamn fucking Marxist. Well, yeah, but the choice is to be a Marxist because capitalism as a social system prevents us from fulfilling practical reason,

not because of any material limits on scarcity or those things. No, absolutely. I mean, isn't it the whole idea that capitalism is the state of communism in progress? Capitalism, according to Marx, is communism under construction. German ideology. I mean, many... I think that's giving too much credit to the sort of material conditions of possibility. That is true, that is true. I think the material conditions of possibility are important. They're obviously necessary, but they're not sufficient. And the sort of the supplement that what socialism or communism would

be is a form of life where there aren't priorities or values put ahead of rational self-determination or of the the like the highest authority is the authority of the better right this is of course you know uh brandon or ray bourzier 101 in the sense that uh if we are actually a team space of reasons, we also need to be team space of material conditions. And hence, the dialectical tension rises again

in the sense that we can ask ourselves to what extent are these material conditions impinge upon reason. You know, the thing is that probably huge amounts, probably even more than Marx or even Darwin would have thought. But how can actually we recover the facts of such impingement? It is only going to be to our rational, systematic theorization about the world i actually would say that material conditions

might have in fact assimilated a lot of things that we understand as rationality society culture and so on and so forth, that, you know, Communization Theory 101. But then what would be there? What would be actually the way to produce intelligibility about such material conditions? How are you going to do that? You know, you can't simply do an Althusserian move anymore by calling something science, and that science has nothing of human rationality and agency

and theoretical flashiness. No, I mean, this is coming back again around the circle that anti-humanism and post-humanism are destined to fail. absolutely under no condition they can actually win humanism can actually win once it recognizes its own Peter Wolfendale unbind reason from animality that's it there is no other way around this shits. Certainly agree with that. Yeah, I guess the two things that I wanted to bring in, then I'm

going to put on my coat, go outside and rejoin you, are the two, so the two limits. One, one is the ecological crisis, right, which I think makes the idea of having an overarching sort of pluralistic or diplomatic political order problematic. I mean, that we need in some sense to have a sort of governance structure for our relations with the environment so as not to overstep ecological limits and we'll probably spend the most of human history trying to mitigate and clean up the damage we've done up to this point. And then the second is what you were describing before

in the sort of black-pilled way of the sort of limits of our sort of biological capacity for reason with the fact that we're rational creatures. Scott Baker is my favorite on this. Sort of philosophically, he's weak, but as a fiction writer and a pessimist, he is second to none. Scott's? Yeah, and as this sort of deep pessimist. Scott is a piece of work. My God. I love it. But I think like he, he voices this skepticism in a really unique way with this, this semantic apocalypse kind of stuff, where it's precisely naturalism. That's the problem, right? We were we were talking about this a bit before with

people in courtrooms, sort of describing everything of theirs as behavior and not like, not having any agency. He even brings up this with regard to like ADHD and the loss of something like a concept of character where someone is like hardworking or lazy whereas we naturalize this now in terms of and his point isn't that this is like necessarily good or bad to naturalize this as a brain disorder. The thing about Scott is the greatest sociological fiction writer I have actually encountered in our time. But he's a man who can't actually understand

how science works. He does not believe in mathematics. I mean, that tells you a lot. He thinks mathematics is some sort of hack upon universe. I mean, are you playing serious? and by the way how many of you have read scott baker's uh neuropath it's a very good book it's a very good book uh a scary book a serial killer book uh but yeah scott is is a very very i would say a dangerous cynic

and very seductive in that sense. I mean, I think the sort of unique value of his kind of skepticism is that he is, it's not the, oh no, you're going to get feedback. It's not. Or before Aaron comes. Ashkat, you want to talk? Oh, sorry.

Yes, but funnily enough, what I wanted to say was to Aaron only. Oh, okay. Wait, can I just finish this comment and then you can talk and I'll just listen because I'm going to be walking. is sort of the way that is sort of the fact that we can technologically manipulate our capacity for reason that we can undercut it that we can see how fragile it is is his cause for pessimism right that in the same way where reza is kind of hoping with a project of artificial intelligence will be able to manipulate understand and increase our capacity for reason. Scott sees the very fact that we can technologically manipulate it in so simple a way that there is no hope that an actual rational order will be possible simply because it's so

easy to cut a thread and disconnect the whole. Yes, but then this is always has been me and my pitch and my discussion with Scott that, look, so you're talking about this sort of stuff. So what about the status of mathematics, right, in neuroscience, and so on and so forth, because this is stuff just are not truly empirical sciences 101, even though it's neurophysiology, right, these are actually built upon certain sort of models that we have actually invented, and it says that, well, you know, mathematics is fiction, I don't want to deal with it, Yeah, well, you better deal with it.

Yeah, so, yeah, I think the difference between me and Scott is that I actually want to look, have a world versions of the humans such that I can actually show, we can renegotiate the boundaries of reason and rationality. in the sense that we can be more inclusive, more accountable, so on and so forth, and emancipatory. Scott's version is that he wants to use this world version or scientific satellites and show that every moment that we take picture of this planet there would be less and less reason

about it and we cannot actually make reason alive at this point yeah so this is just like a uh the the story here and i actually love uh you know is is narrative is a story and stuff but I don't think that it has a philosophical foothold, precisely because the idea of world version that he has in mind, scientific world versions, don't come out of blue, out of nothing. they require certain amounts of something more than data gathering

mathematical models theory formation so on and so forth and all of these are normative jobs he doesn't want to actually agree with that so he goes full with the figure of chiropractor, a serial killer who kills people, takes their spines as a symbol of trophy and does it with gold dust. like the ultimate crown of neuroscience

the trophy of neuroscience against human reason professor before before we wrap up and perhaps we can still have some time or Akshat and Aman, but I just wanted to be sure how we, because people were asking about our next class on Wednesday, and so just to announce for everybody who didn't follow the chat, our next class is on Wednesday, same time, but we had three presentations that were already organized um one on wolfendale one on on the work of the inhuman yours um and one

on on brassius the human i was thinking should we get them to let's let's have the uh the first two on wednesday and the last one in the last session all right because we need more time last session than next session right so um yeah i'll just perhaps maybe maybe uh pete and ray presentation should be next all right so if people from these groups are here and and they think they they can do it um by wednesday i i'm here i i was in the pitch school

but i i cannot make it on wednesday i don't know like i mean i'm i the only reason that i said that uh wednesday was because you know it was just too close to the current class but i can actually do it on tuesday or thursday i don't know oh i i cannot unfortunately make it during the week because of strike classes that i should go in oh i see but so how about you actually give the how about you actually give the presentation last session and we have a kind of a mix uh next session would be wednesday

but what we can like talking group because we were four people actually and we can talk and see like how it goes i don't want to like for one person like uh change the schedule or something yeah talk after class yeah i will try and email um everybody and and ask perhaps what we can do let's stay with Wednesday and then we ask everybody what we can do and then perhaps we just you can record the presentations and send to us and we can watch and discuss it before Friday perhaps something like that I don't know that would be magnificent yeah that would be if if you can do that, that would be magnificent.

Thank you so much. So the presentation is going to be Friday at the last session or? Yes, I guess. Yeah, I was sending the email if because I don't know, I guess none of the groups can have all of the participants presenting on Wednesday. I have this impression. So if we follow the idea, then we would have Res's presentation on the Inhuman on Friday, and the others would probably have to send, including you, Cassie, I guess, would probably have to send us the recording just before that, and we watch it and we can discuss it. All right.

So perhaps you can have our a few last questions before wrapping up. If you if I'm an Akshat is to. Right so it wasn't as much of a question as it was maybe an introduction to what Aaron was saying. So when Reza was pointing out like this logic, what does the material, like the logic of the material leaders to of the material conditions? Aaron interjected that like, that the one thing that we need to have and the one thing that we need to ensure in addendum to material conditions is people's right to self-determination.

And I think, I'm not sure if I'm being very incorrect here when I say this, but a lot of like, for me, leftist thinking, unlike communist logic is specifically oriented against that. Because I don't think we want people to be able to self-determine to be bourgeoisie or self-determine to be fascist or self-determine to be a lot of things. So I was actually thinking about this earlier today, how one of the reasons why authoritarian leftist governments do so badly with the gender spectrum and identification along that is because maybe somewhere in the logic it is hard coded that too much self-determination

is bad and I know like someone some like the first attack on this sentence would be from someone quoting hegel from the phenomenology about how the individual is con like constituted within the group dialectic like how the individual realizes their own destiny or like their own individuality within that but like i was just thinking about how like self-determination is something that is actually very antithetical to the logic of material conditions because like obviously we also want to limit like a leftist revolution is predicated on the fact that we're

actually going to take self-determination away from the top four or five percent of the population in order to ensure better material conditions for the remaining 95. So maybe self-determination is not also very important along these lines. Yes, I mean, you see, one of the main problems here that arise, as we have been talking about, is that the concept of individual in Marxist sense, or in a Hegelian sense, is a social being. uh so there is a there is like a two-tier uh sort of uh self-determination by the individual within the social and social for and on behalf of the individual right

uh it seems to me that a majority of these moves from neoliberal to uh you know hard marxism uh actually abide by the extremes uh the fact that individual self-determination has not been fully and comprehensively bridged with societal you know uh self-determination it means that it is rife with hazards and uh all sorts of uh you know uh recipe for lethality and

fatality um this comes back to this idea that uh you know we were talking on discord that uh there should be, they are not mutually exclusive. I mean, neither in Marxism or even no liberalism, they are not mutually exclusive. But how can we actually bridge the two such that we have a collective that, rather than basically curtailing the freedom of the individual maximize the individual freedom

right people actually think that by itself collective freedom is the best thing no it really it's not there is no such a thing in philosophy that says that or in political philosophy that says that collective freedom by itself is a venerable thing. No, collective freedom is only good. Precisely, it's supposed to maximize the freedom, namely the positive freedom, rather negative, the positive freedom of individuals, freedom to do something. Otherwise, collectivity would be just like a congested traffic of negative individual freedoms.

And that's not good for anyone, including the collective. So yes, the idea of collective freedom has always been philosophically invented in order to maximize the positive individual freedoms. positive individual freedoms precisely because positive freedoms if they are truly positive freedoms uh tend to converge tend to converge toward collective ends and rather than they are not you see negative freedom is always individualistic at its base but you need to have negative freedoms too as Foucault has shown about persons uh within the capitalist

society, the position in the, you know, modern society and so on and so forth. But no one actually wants to maximize the, I mean, the collective should not supposed to maximize negative freedom. Negative freedom ends up to be individualistic, as we have seen it in the American society with no liberalist agenda and so on and so forth. collective freedom should maximize, allow for more positive freedoms. Like you could do something that you couldn't otherwise do if you were by yourself. But now that you are in a collective, you can do something perhaps more.

That's positive freedom. And this is like a kind of like a trivial philosophical lesson how individual and social are supposed to balance each other. Can I respond quickly as well? Sure. So I guess the main thrust, I was sort of responding in my head to, I was in Twitter controversy about a week ago as well about this, but about this sort the vulgar materialist conception of Marxism, that socialism or communism is just when we have abolished material scarcity to the point that,

and because sort of collective management of production will be more efficient, won't create artificial scarcity, we won't have the sort of moral allocation problems of capitalist society. And I think this is just sort of plainly wrong. I think, of course, sort of Marx does believe that sort of modern industrial production is a condition of possibility for what he thinks of as communism. Obviously, you can't have that in a society where there's fighting over scarce resources, but that the sort of, yeah, sort of rationalistic enlightenment social framework

that he sees as sort of determining, not determining, but sort of governing social relations in a society that is over from the state is only possible and that its conditions and possibility like aren't dependent upon specific material conditions. I guess the best the best example of this I can think of was someone we brought up last week actually, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. She's usually thought of as an anarchist writer, but I think the society on the moon, the kind of anarchist society, is her thought example of what would communism be under conditions of material scarcity. Right? And you still can have a non-coercive

society under conditions of material scarcity. People can ration and sort of manage this, at least in her imagination um and it's not communism and the reason that it's not communism is because the physicist gets ostracized right the physicist is that we don't have the resources to let you do your theoretical physics this is a waste um because because we live on this sort of barren moon planet we all need to mine and trade with with our capitalist neighbor to survive and you're going to do the work like everyone else and this physicist is denied the sort of rational economy to do do his theoretical physics and he has to go to the capitalist planet where

a wealthy patron will pay him to do theoretical physics um and so like the ideal of communism is the like yeah i think adorno is 100 right is the kingdom of that is is this society where where the only authority the only just authority is the authority of the better reason um yeah right like and so it's it's not about this kind of coercion of the wealth like the wealthy are denied their self-determination uh i don't know that's the clarification i guess so i guess arun the one thing that i would add to that would be that maybe this guy like i'm not on twitter as a rule because like I think there's nothing valuable going on there but one of the things that this guy

is doing I think he's like misreading Marx maybe because like everything there is inside Marxism at least as far as I can see is geared towards how the dialectic will then turn in upon itself and then start resolving the contradictions inside the party and inside the country. so like it's not even unique to Marx because like if you look at Nietzsche and like his great politics that is also centered upon like a very dialectical uh internal resolution of contradictions and like uh it's like this is a throwaway fact maybe but like uh a very interesting thing that is like very similar to Le Guin's uh story is uh it's called A Pale of Air uh by Freitz Lieber

and it's like about people on a rogue planet so it's like I'll just type it out in the chart and everyone can look it up maybe there is this I mean you probably know the controversy between Gayatriya Spivak and Bruno Latour do any of you know anything about that no please uh so um uh you know i i think that they're just like uh even though i temporarily take side with spivak on this issue but i think that it's just

like dumb thing. So Gayatri Spivak says to Bruno Latour that look, there are actants who make differences, but subalterns never speak, right? And so the conversation starts from this whole thing, the subaltern never speaks. Even though they are participated, they actually never speak. The thing is that Gayatri Spivak doesn't actually want to endorse a certain

sort of rational sphere where they can actually subaltern be heard. She wants to keep, preserve the idea of subaltern as that which never speaks because it has no power to speak, right? Like in a sort of totalized other. I mean, yeah, there's many of these sort of sub, and I actually know understand that uh that uh you know these are not actually quite original philosophical or theoretical ideas they have been repeated over and over in sci-fi um i'm sorry reza can i just add something with respect to spavok

Yeah, sure. So this criticism, I was like unfamiliar that Latour had called her out on this. But this is the main reason that she's disliked in her own country. So this whole commodification of the subaltern, which is like then used to, like, now I'm going to be a little bit rude towards like academics, but like to generate careers for like upper caste academics who are then like writing about uh the subaltern the dalit in india and uh a lot of like dalit thought and a lot of like people who like in india are actively opposed to uh spivak because of this so one of those people uh is actually um um menon uh and like there is a zizek menon debate

which is like not really a debate Zizek was invited to speak in Delhi Menon was sort of holding out on the event and like the introduction was the one thing that Zizek and Menon have in common is that Gayatri Svivak is annoyed by both of them and so this criticism of Svivak is like something which is like because like with respect to the upper castes or the Savarna, the main criticism of the Dalits or the Avarna is that they are even commodifying the liberation of the Dalit Sandhya Varna's in order to gain academic status in foreign countries. And they're parsing out this understanding of the subaltern,

which is digestible to the Western neoliberal left. Yeah, this is... I don't know how many of you have read Philip Mirowski. He's one of the greatest thinkers of our time. He wrote a magnificent book called More Heat Than Light. I can't remember. It was in the 80s and 90s. So Philip Mirowski actually writes a very, very escaping review of Bruno Latour and Graham Harman. you know he shouldn't actually read graham harman but he actually writes that review precisely

because graham harman is a stunning uh bruno latour and he actually says something quite funny he says that Bruno Latour is nothing but a profiteer who actually makes his life out of the commodification of non-humans. You can probably say the same thing about the Spivak in terms of subaltern. yeah I mean these sort of positions have already come to fundamental scrutiny some of them are

justified some of them are not I actually think but yeah I mean this naturalization of the order that oh well subaltern is something that which never talks well well well then isn't it the whole idea that grunbaum warned us against that you know that which is completely unknown and cannot be known render intelligible doesn't have a case so you are essentially trying to commodify something that does not actually have a case oppression has a case not the unknown unknown right anyway uh funnily enough is the oppressor in this case so it is in her interest

to not call that out i i i've never actually met her to be honest with you i don't know who she i mean i have read her but i have never met her in person i mean sometimes i actually tell myself that look if you actually meet a person you might have a better idea uh unfortunately in many cases that is not really the case never meet your heroes um so one of the things about this um this so the reason i got into an argument and the people who were defending her against me were like um people from portland right and like they're my friends and they're my online friends and the reason that i got into

an argument with them was over like something very basic it's a jargonification with respect to philosophy and how necessary it is so essentially my position was that uh the way spivak writes would essentially take a subaltern person a lot of time in order to read like any person it would take a lot of time in order to read so how can you be how can you be writing about the liberation of people or be creating like topics or like philosophy about the liberation of people and have it be inaccessible to the people whose liberation it is about so it's maybe yeah i mean of course you know i i

used to do that too. I used to do that too. I mean, a lot of jargons, a lot of, you know, Italianism, neologism, so on and so forth. But I think that for a philosopher who is getting matured, should I stop doing that? Stop making more neologisms and actually make more clear, transparent texts right um and and yes uh i would say that i mean the whole idea of philosophy at this point in my opinion uh not not the idea of philosophy

the idea of philosophy as is being practiced it's quite cursed it's quite cursed uh so many jargons so many untransparency. I mean, and I always want people talk about, you know, the unespoken, the oppressed and so on and so forth. But my God, as you say, you know, would you be able to spend less time on making new goddamn jargons and actually put more time for the oppressed? To be honest with you, I think it's not going to happen. This is the curse of this field, unfortunately. But someone should actually come, not like a pig-headed Sokal or these sort of people,

someone who actually with the understanding, the modest understanding of philosophy, should create a certain sort of, I don't know, movement that allow us to write clearly. I mean, people always, I have noticed that, particularly, I'm not talking about our class, in my other classes, in actually, in academia uh they always tend to actually make things more looking more intricate than what they are right uh you know that's not a good actually thing it takes much more label labor than work

to make things more clear than what they are to write something clear actually takes far more work making some goddamn jumbled shit but it is not up to me to decide on such matters and hence goodbye love you see you wednesday ciao bye